What do you get when a superhero drinks too much, is self-absorbed and for all intents and purposes, a jerk?
What if all-around good guy Will Smith plays the superhero?
Add top-notch special effects and you have all the makings for a terrific film for a worldwide audience to enjoy.
What a great idea!
Unfortunately, lots of great ideas end up as complete messes.
Remember New Coke?
What about Pets.com?
Kevin Costner's "Waterworld?"
Well, please add "Hancock" to the list.
After about 45 entertaining minutes, the film collapses in the second half after a head-scratching plot turn that doesn't know where to go next.
Smith plays the lead as a superhero with seemingly all of Superman's powers —except he's not loved by his hometown of Los Angeles.
Hancock leaves massive potholes whenever takes off for flight or lands. (He hasn't learned the soft landing yet.)
He heaves a sick beached whale hundreds of yards on top of a sailboat.
And when he saves Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman) from an oncoming train, he wrecks the locomotive instead of simply moving the car.
Luckily Ray is a public relations consultant and he volunteers to help rehabilitate Hancock's image so the general populace will love him.
At the same time, hopefully, Hancock will learn to love himself again.
Smith is good and the audience will have fun watching him play the anti-hero, and Bateman is solid as a modest suburban white-collar everyman with a pretty wife, Mary (Charlize Theron), and dutiful son, Aaron (Jae Head), who try to help out our not-so-lovable superhero.
It's a clever premise and it works.
But when Hancock starts to turn his life around pretty early on in the film, one wonders what remains for the second half of the picture.
Well, the movie takes a strange left turn and suddenly, it becomes a maudlin love story.
And it doesn't work.
Oh, and there's no super villain either.
Every superhero deserves an equally evil super villain.
Instead we get a second rate bank robber as memorable as your basic Happy Meal toy.
And the last ten minutes of the film were some of the most manipulative yet ineffectual attempts to pull my emotional strings that I've seen onscreen in years.
I felt cheated.
But the actors are not to blame as Smith, Bateman and Theron try their best under weight of the lackluster material.
No, the problem with the picture is the writing and the buck stops with screenwriters Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan.
Well, add director Peter Berg as well if he took any creative license with their material.
Now, I'm being a little coy about the second half of the film because I don't want to give "the secret" away.
But, don't hand over your hard earned $10 just to see what the secret is all about.
If that's the only reason to see this film, just ask a friend who suffered through the pain of watching the second half of "Hancock."
Reach the reporter at: jeffrey.mitchell@asu.edu.
